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Lofty Philosophy
First off, I'd like to explain how this here company handles it's finances. If four people are involved in the creation of a game, each one of them gets a 25% cut of the profits. Flat out, even split. No exceptions... well, OK, almost no exceptions. If I'm paying an outside company to mass produce something, they don't get a cut, because they already gave me a bill. Plus, if I do something like, say, put out an RPG book where I write every word, and get 50 artists to each provide one illustration (not likely), I'm going to take more than a 2% cut. Basically though, it's an even split. Still on the business side of things, I won't publish a game I didn't work on. This is mainly an issue of proper creditting more than anything else. If someone comes to me with a game I absolutely love, and all I do is slap my logo on the side and sell it, I'm basically taking credit for someone else's work, no matter how big I print their name on the box. It also throws a wrench in the whole profit splitting bit. So, while I do plan on eventually putting out some games primarily written by other people, I insist on contributing creatively to'em. Now then, moving on to some quick thoughts about designing games, there are two main things I make a point of avoiding whenever possible. First, repackaged games. By that I mean, games that play out just like other games, with cosmetic changes only. Granted, there are only so many basic elements a game can really include, so every game out there is going to be fairly similar to a couple others, but I like to draw the line a little wider than most. There are often cases where a company will release, for instance, a game with a fantasy theme, and then follow it up with what's really the exact same game with a space theme. The basic rules are exactly the same, and most, if not all, of the nuts and bolts are taken straight from the fantasy version and just given new names and illustrations. I'm against doing this myself. Using a more immediate example, there are plenty of ideas I've had for Massive Vs. Masses sets that I've thrown out because they would play too similarly to a pre-existing set. The Army's rules about cards in your hand and citizens for instance is exclusive to The Army. All other sets must handle that sort of thing differently. Second, I'm not all that fond of expansions, or booster packs, sourcebooks, etc. It isn't that I have some issue with adding on to a game, it's just that I don't like putting a product on the shelf that you can't take home by itself and play. It generally isn't too hard to take what would otherwise be an expansion, and turn it into a compatible stand-alone game, and there's a lot of benefits to doing so. For instance, everyone in your personal gaming group can buy just one of these myriad games, and any given one of you can play it with random people, you can always combine everyone's games if you get together and someone can't make it, etc. With the expansion model, nobody could play unless you had the core game handy, so either one person would need to buy everything, or every one of you would need their own copy of the core game, which are going to get shoved in closets when you're all together. Presumably, it works out nicely for stores too, since they can stock any given item at any given time, without needing to dedicate space to a whole line. | |||
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